Neuf Cegetel, the French competitive telecom carrier has just started selling a 50 megabits per second fiber-to-the-home connection that costs about 30 Euros (about $40) a month. In comparison, 50 Mbps costs a while lot of money in the US. Verizon, Surewest and Cablevision are three companies currently offering 50 megs at a wallet-ripping price. For $40 you get somewhere between 3-to-6 Mbps (voice and television not included) from most carriers in the US.
Neuf’s service is currently available in select parts of Paris & Pau (a town in the very south of France) and also includes VoIP and HD & Regular TV over IP services. The company is also in talks to buy the Club Internet broadband business from Deutsche Telekom. It it adds 600,000 Club Internet customers, then Neuf will become the #2 broadband provider in France, behind Orange, which has 4.2 million subscribers.
